The Only Winning Move

Since it’s become something of an institution around here to call the IDS out on their bogus reporting on rape, here’s a takedown of the latest installment.

Much to their apparent chagrin, reported incidents of rape are way down on campus this year. Only 3 reports so far - as opposed to 9 by this time last year. But never fear - rapes in Bloomington in general are “up.” See, there were 26 reports of rape in Bloomington last year, and there have been exactly that many so far this year. The IDS’ conclusion?

While the number for the city increases, the number of reported rapes for campus has decreased somewhat, said IU Police Department Sgt. Leslie Slone, who suspects reports do not reflect the true statistics.

Gotta love the “somewhat.” Reported rapes are down almost 70% from this time last year, a drop which never qualified as “somewhat” in anyone’s book. But alright - to be fair, when your number is as low as 9 out of a student population of 40,000 - i.e. a report rate of 0.02% - then actually, statistically speaking, there is no meaningful difference between 3 and 9. Technically, the rate of rape reports is down 66% or so, but with a baseline as small as 9, any change seems significant. More realistic is just to say that report rates of 0.007% and of 0.02% are both low enough to qualify as “rare.” My bone to pick with Sgt. Slone is more that I kinda doubt, somehow, that if IDS interviews her next year and the rate of reports is 15 rather than 3 (or 9), she’s gonna say that the rape is “up somewhat” but that the increase doesn’t reflect the true statistic. It seems more likely that she’ll be blustering about a “500% increase” and calling rape on campus an “epidemic.”

The reason that I think Sgt. Slone is scaremongering is this.

Slone said she doesn’t think the number of actual rapes is decreasing - people are simply not reporting them.

Oh? And how does Sgt. Slone know this? Her magic 8-ball told her? C’mon - there is very little in the world that is less professional than reporting as fact something that, by definition, can’t be measured. Sgt. Slone’s impressions don’t even count as useful conjecture unless she can give us some kind of reason to adopt her view. Absent such a thing, she’s the textbook single-issue cop - you know, the kind that thinks that all teenaged punks are on drugs, or the kind that preferentially pulls over black drivers because “they’re all up to no good.” If you’ve decided that the underlying rape rate never changes no matter what the surface report statistics say, then why bother keeping numbers on the reports at all?

It gets better:

“This last year [forcible rapes] have been terribly under-reported, and of the incidents reported to us, 99.9 percent are located indoors, with someone who is known to the victim, and involves alcohol,” Slone said.

“Terribly under-reported,” ladies and gentlemen. It isn’t just that she “suspects” that rape is under-reported, she in fact knows it and knows that the problem is so pervasive it can reasonably be described as “terrible.” Not only that, but she uses her excellent math skills to tell us that 99.9% of the cases that are reported “are located indoors.” Taken literally, that means that out of 3 cases exactly 0.003 of them were outdoors, a number which doesn’t even round up to 1! She can hardly have meant that 1 out of the 3 was a stranger rape, right? ‘Cause that would be 33%, not 0.1%. So I think she means to say that all 3 reports so far this year were daterape incidents. What I still don’t get is how that has anything to do with her supposition that there were, in actual fact, much more than 3 rapes this year? I mean, what does the fact that the reports were all of daterape have to do with anything? I should think that rape of the “Central Park Jogger” variety is more likely to be reported than the daterape kind, no? The classic feminist suppositions about why rape is underreported are generally these: that the victim either unfairly blames herself for having sent false signals, or feels ashamed and doesn’t want the public humiliation, or else cares enough about her attacker that she doesn’t want to get him in trouble. ALL of these explanations (with the possible exception of the public humiliation one - though in that case the “penalty” is nevertheless surely greater for daterape since she presumably travels in the same social circles with her attacker and will have to deal with his friends) only really work for daterape. Which means that we can’t look at the 3 cases so far this year, notice that none of them were stranger rape and conclude from that that rape must be underreported because acquaintance rape is overrepresented!

Actually, let me be a bit more precise - using some of Noah’s General Recognition Theory framework (an idea he put me onto in a comment on an earlier one of these posts - to give credit where it’s due). A criminologist studying rape would be interested in four types of situation on the part of a citizen: a truthful report of rape, a false report of rape, a failure to report a real rape, and a correct decision not to report a rape when none has occurred. Obviously any criminal policy will want to maximize truthful reports of rape and (and I admit that this one sounds odd to naive ears) restraint from falsely reporting rape. Likewise, any criminal policy will want to minimize false reports of rape and also minimize failure to report real rapes. Now - the police, as such, can really only deal directly with reported rapes, so they’re mostly interested in distinguishing between false and true reports. (Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that in reality: given a report that they believe is true, they also have to decide whether it’s worth prosecuting, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.) If the standard psychological arguments are to be believed, then acquaintance rape is the problematic kind - both because it is likely to be underreported, and also because it is likely to be overreported. I’m just guessing here, of course, but I suppose that little work needs to be done maximizing the number of true reports of stranger rape and minimizing the number of false reports. I guess both failure to report and inventing stories (a la Tawana Brawley) are comparatively rare for this kind of rape. For acquaintance rape, however, the situation is murkier. There is more motivation to underreport this kind of rape (because the social consequences of reporting are presumably higher within your own social circle for the reasons outlined above). Perhaps paradoxically, there is also more motivation to falsely report it - partly because signals really do get misunderstood in situations involving flirting acquaintances and alcohol, and partly because there are also nontrivial social consequences for a girl who sleeps with someone ill-advisedly. An unscrupulous girl may try to protect herself from these by putting all the blame on the guy.

So what? Well, let’s assume that what Sgt. Slone means by connecting her conjecture that rape is “terribly underreported” to the fact that all the reports so far this year have been of acquaintance rape is that since we know that acquaintance rape is likely to be underreported we can surmise that for each of these reported rapes, there were many more than went unreported. Fair enough - but by the same token, of course, we have to assume that some of the reported rapes are also false reports. That is, at least some of these 3 reports won’t pan out.

Which is to say - we just don’t know from these numbers how many acquaintance rapes there were on campus this year. It could’ve been 3, could’ve been 9, could’ve been 15, could’ve been 0. Sgt. Slone is out of line to draw conclusions based on evidence she doesn’t have about a crime whose actual occurrence rate is notoriously decoupled from the rate of reporting.

No doubt Sgt. Slone means well. She’s trying to encourage victims who haven’t yet to come forward so that the police can do their job. Unfortunately, her good intentions come at a price. If the police give the impression that they are nothing but sympathetic to reports of rape they will only encourage false reports. And let’s make no bones about it - false reports are real, they’re common, and they’re damaging. Certainly we want to encourage people to come forward if they have, in fact, been raped, but there is a tradeoff here that should not be ignored.

But of course, the reason why I constantly harp on IDS reports of campus rape is because they are in the business of ignoring it. They do it so consistently, in fact, that it can only be deliberate. I repeat what I’ve said before: I’ve been following these reports in the IDS for 3 years, and not once have I seen a mention of the consequences false reports. This is inexcusable.

And in many ways, this article is the biggest culprit I’ve seen so far. Consider this:

Sixty percent of sexual assaults are not reported to the police, even though reporting has increased by one-third since 1993, according to the RAINN Web site.

I have no idea which method of parapsychology RAINN itself is using to get these numbers, of course, so I can’t really comment on its accuracy. The point is that the IDS seems to take the numbers as accurate, which sort of commits them to a belief in a trend where reports are dramatically higher than a decade ago. By implication, that also either commits them to the position that a fall in the rate of reporting is coupled with a fall in the actual rate, or that the increase in reports is at least partly accounted for by false reports. But apparently Sgt. Slone’s spider sense is better than logic.

Later, there is a quote from a BPD officer warning that false reports make the police’s job difficult. Great, right? They’re mentioning the problem? Erm, not exactly. Lest you take Sgt. Canada’s statement to mean that people sometimes report rapes that never happened, the IDS is there to clear it up for you in the next sentence:

In some situations the victim denies drinking and thus makes their case more difficult to take to court. The credibility of a victim is paramount to the legislative process that occurs after an investigation, Canada said.

So you see, the nice Sgt. Canada didn’t mean that anyone would make up stories, ’cause that never happens. He was just advising that you level with him about the embarrassing facts so that the police can do their best to help you prosecute your absolutely true and never-in-doubt accusation.

One of these days I guess we’ll get an actual discussion about rape that’s concerned about all citizens, and not just the special class of them this reporter is concerned with. For the moment, however, IDS seems to be sticking to its standard routine of backing the feminist politicization of the issue. Disgusting.

In all the fuss about Jesse Helms’ death, it seems I’ve missed the other July 4th death - that of Thomas M. Disch, a pioneering science fiction writer who killed himself last Friday after suffering from depression for two years. RIP.

I am from North Carolina. A few days ago, someone asked me what I thought about Jesse Helms. I dodged the question.

I always feel like I’m being set up when out-of-staters ask me about Helms. The same way, I guess, that any American feels set up when a European asks him about, say, the Freemen. Helms is not only hugely polarizing, he’s also a lightningrod for anti-southern stereotypes. Generally speaking, when people bring him up, they’ve already got something in mind.

So what to say about Senator Helms? Judging by what people have been saying on the internet for the past week, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that there are only two acceptable opinions, really. Either your devotion to fighting bigotry requires you to condemn him in no uncertain terms, or you’re patriotic enough that you don’t let a little thing like racism stop you from remembering that Jesse won the Cold War. There doesn’t seem to be much room for middle ground.

But that’s a shame, because I think we could all stand to learn a thing or two from Jesse Helms. If, that is, we’re willing to think through it a bit more.

Was Helms a bigot? Jay Nordlinger, writing in National Review, has this to say about him on race.

I don’t know that he was completely innocent on race. I doubt he was especially guilty - particularly for a white southerner born in 1921. And, about affirmative action - a.k.a. race preferences - he was 100 percent right.

That’s a good way of putting it. It’s undeniable that Helms stared out as a racist - or at least a deliberate racial polarizer. Whether he finished up as one is harder to say. That he hung out with Rosie Grier and voted to confirm Clarence Thomas suggests he had a change of heart somewhere along the road. But since he never came out and publicly repented a la Strom Thurmond or George Wallace, there’s always room for doubt.

The question is clearer as applies to homosexuals: he was a bigot right to the end. Gays were “disgusting people,” and sodomy was solely responsible for the AIDS epidemic. Justifying his vote against confirming Roberta Achtenberg, Helms didn’t mind going on record saying:

She’s a damn lesbian. I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.

Alright - Jesse, you’re a bigot.

But here’s the thing. Come election time, voters only generally get two choices - well, viable choices, anyway. It’s nice to think that you always have the luxury of voting for someone you like against someone you dislike. But that rarely happens in reality. More common is that we pull the lever for the one of the two who seems more likely to vote our way on more of the issues we care about more of the time. Jesse had his true believers to be sure, but if you want to know why he managed to win five Senate elections in a row, you’ll have more luck looking at his opponents than you will sniffing out racism and fundamentalism in the North Carolina electorate.

Take his most famous election - the 1990 “last-minute” win over Harvey Gantt. Conventional wisdom has it that Helms was trailing 49-41 up until he ran the infamous “White Hands” ad, which supposedly handed him “the racist vote,” buying Helms a “surprise” 53-47 win come election day. The trouble with the standard explanation is two-fold. First, to buy it you have to be in a position to believe that fully 10% of the electorate was willing either to vote for a black man or at least stand by and stay at home while one polled ahead of the white guy until Helms reminded them they were racists. If that’s really what was going on, then these people can’t have been very devoted to the cause. Second, you have to be in a position to ignore the fact that everything the ad says happens to be true. Racial quotas DO operate by awarding jobs on the basis of race over merit, and Harvey Gantt HAD made support for them an important part of his campaign. It’s no more racist for a white person to vote against Gantt on that basis than it is for a homosexual to vote against Helms on account of his opposition to Roberta Achtenberg’s confirmation.

I don’t know exactly what explains the discrepancy between the Charlotte Observer’s pre-election poll and the actual election results - but here’s one theory that doesn’t rely too much on racism: it’s a classic Bradley Effect. White people will sometimes tell pollsters that they’re planning to vote for the black guy even though they’re not really considering it just because they don’t want to appear racist. Given Helms’ reputation, and given the sheer amount of national media attention that the 1990 race attracted, and given the stereotypes that lots of Americans have about the South, it’s really not too hard to see why pundits should have expected a Bradley Effect in North Carolina that year. It’s easy to tell the media you’re voting for Gantt to make North Carolina look good; it’s a bit harder to actually pull the lever for someone who has promised to make a federal policy out of denying you jobs from time to time because you happen to be white. There was nothing unfair about Helms’ ad, nor was there anything unfair about how people voted. What’s unfair is the media taking their own forecasting incompetence as evidence that North Carolina elections are won on racist voting lines.

And really, most of Helms’ legacy suffers from the same kind of commentator shortsightedness. It’s fun to point out that Helms whistled Dixie in the elevator with Carol Mosley-Braun deliberately trying to “make her cry.” But if you’re gonna do it, at least mention the real reason for it. It wasn’t so much about race as it was the fact that she’d made a big issue out of the use of the Confederate Flag in southern states. If Helms felt that wasn’t any of her business - what with her being from Illinois and all - I’m right behind him. Singing Dixie in the elevator isn’t a nice thing to do, but c’mon, she brought it on herself.

If people want to understand where Helms came from and why he was in the Senate for so long, I suggest they will have more luck thinking of the question the other way around. It isn’t so much a matter of “how bigoted must the population of North Carolina be to send that man to the Senate 5 times in a row????” Think of it like this instead. Whatever your personal feelings about affirmative action, you should be able to appreciate why it will be offensive to a lot of people. If you’re expecting a softball on that issue, you’re not being realistic. And indeed, the fact that the left so often feels the need to stack the deck by accusing anyone who opposes affirmative action of being a closet racist shows that they are realistic about it. Affirmative action isn’t an easy sell, and they know it. Given that fact, it’s as good as a law of Political Science that there will be a high-profile opponent of it somewhere. So let’s try to imagine what kind of description that opponent will likely meet. Well, for one thing, he probably has a not-completely-undeserved reputation for bigotry himself. That follows not because all opponents of affirmative action are bigots, but because anyone willing to make it a central issue is going to have to be someone who is unusually insensitive to the charge. That is, someone who is less concerned than normal with appearing anti-racist. For another thing, that person will probably be southern. Again, this is not because southerners are more racist than the rest of the country in reality, but just because they have less to lose by being publicly accused of racism. Northerners often wonder why the South doesn’t do more to fight its racist reputation. Southerners know that there is no point. Whatever we do, we’re going to be associated with racism simply because that excuse is too convenient for the rest of the country. It’s how Michigan avoids thinking of itself as racist even though it’s Detroit, and not Atlanta, that is the prototypical example of white flight ahead of school desegregation. It’s how Massachusetts accomplishes the same feat even though Boston desegregated later and saw more associated violence than any southern city. Another reason we can expect him to be southern is that southerners have more to lose from affirmative action in general. Support for affirmative action is cheap if you live somewhere where there are few minorities and therefore few people artificially pricing themselves into your job market as a result. If you live somewhere like the South where there are lots of minorities, the stakes are obviously higher. It’s no different from supporting tax increases so long as they only apply to people in higher income groups than yours. The closer a tax gets to affecting you, the less likely you are to support it, no? And indeed, of all the places in the South, North Carolina seems the most likely place of all. That’s because - at 19% of the population - there are enough black people in NC that affirmative action will be expensive to white voters, but not so many that they can form an election-deciding block. Jesse Helms fits this profile perfectly.

It isn’t that North Carolinians are particularly racist, or that Jesse Helms is evidence of latent bigotry there. The real explanation isn’t that “sexy.” To understand why Jesse Helms won five Senate elections in a row, you need only look at the context. First, North Carolina is an incumbent’s paradise. The incumbent always wins in important elections; that’s just how things work there. Helms won his first election in 1972 against someone who had also never been to the Senate, and after that he was always a shoe-in. Indeed, the closest result he ever polled was against Jim Hunt in 1984 - a sitting governor at the time, and the man who went on, at 4 terms, to become the longest-serving governor in the state’s history. Set an incumbent to catch an incumbent, as it were… Second, keep in mind that elections are not about who you like and don’t so much as who comes out better on balance. It’s a lazy explanation that reduces any election to a single issue. In reality, we all vote for the man who’s better on balance because there is so rarely someone we agree with on even 80% of the issues. Third, all the stuff National Review is saying about Helms’ character is true. Think what you will about him, he was a really nice guy who loved his home state and did what he could for his constituents. Whether or not you agreed with Helms on everything, at the very least you never felt betrayed by him. Unless of course you were gay, Jesse was on your side.

Commentators need to be clearer about what they mean when they write Helms off as a bigot. The issue isn’t so much whether or not he was a bigot (at least on homosexuals, he clearly was), but whether the cordon sanitaire against bigotry in American politics need really be so absolute that people should feel compelled to vote for guys like Gantt just to maintain it. It’s true that Helms voted not to confirm Roberta Achtenberg at least in part because she was a lesbian, but that didn’t stop her confirmation going through. As an anti-gay crusader, he was pretty harmless, really. So the question comes down to whether it’s worth it to vote for a guy like Gantt (or stay home and let him be elected) just to keep someone like Helms from being unable to block the appointment of an Achtenberg. I don’t think it makes you a bigot to say it’s not.

So what do I think about Helms personally? Truth be told, I don’t think much about him one way or the other. On the one hand, he’s no friend to libertarians. He was a dyed-in-the-wool drug warrior, lent his name to the Helms-Burton Act, supported energy monopolies, and was a founding member of the modern religious right. On the other hand, he’s no enemy to libertarians either. He was a reliable vote against tax increases, for deregulation, against foreign aid that wasn’t in the narrowly-defined national interest, against welfare, against the UN, against racial preferences, and probably the single person who did more than anyone else to get Ronald Reagan elected president. So I think of Senator Helms as a blessing and a curse. He wasn’t my friend, but he wasn’t exactly my enemy either. I can say without hesitation that he was the better choice between the two in all of his Senate elections. In a democracy, that’s all that’s required of him.

Commentary on Senator Helms is overblown. All the people who are quick to call him a patriot are guilty of saying nothing about him that matters. Most Senators are patriots, I suspect, and patriotism is in any case no automatic defense for any policy. All the people who are quick to call him a bigot are probably correct, but this is less interesting than they think. They need to instead take the opportunity to make the case that we need a cordon sanitaire against public displays of bigotry as absolute as the one they are implicitly advocating. I do not like their chances.

Senator Helms died last week. He was in the Senate for 30 years, where he was hugely influential, especially on foreign policy matters. Books will be written about him for many years to come. I, for one, am not going to kid myself that I have enough room in a blog post to say anything that will do the man or his legacy justice. My throwaway comment on Senator Helms, in other words, is that I decline to make one. Read into that what you will.

Mike Gallagher has a column on Townhall today called Jesse Jackson Takes One for the Team”. It makes the probably-not-too-controversial assertion that Jackson’s “accidental” comments about wanting to cut Barack Obama’s nuts off weren’t accidental at all.

By now, you’ve probably seen the video or heard the audio that features Jackson, in a creepy whisper, say to the man sitting next to him that he wants to turn Obama into a eunuch. He did so while sitting in a TV studio with an earpiece in his ear, a microphone clamped to his body, bright lights shining on him, and a camera staring into his face.

I smell a rat.

Yeah - me too. But not the same one that Gallagher’s smelling.

So then we’re left with a solitary, logical question: why would he purposely do such a thing?

The answer is painfully obvious. It helps Barack Obama.

Huh? How?

Well, apparently by giving Obama plausible deniability with regard to Jackson. Jackson is a polarizing race-baiter, Obama’s been having trouble with white voters over the Rev. Wright fallout, and so this allows him to distance himself from the affirmative action industry a bit. Sounds plausible, right? Well, right up until the part about Jesse Jackson putting his career on the skids so that Obama can get a couple of cheap points.

Is it possible that Jesse Jackson is such a media tramp that he’d actually fabricate a situation like this?

You’d better believe he is.

Of course Jackson is “such a media tramp” that he’d get recorded saying something like this on purpose. That’s not even a question. The question is whether “such a media tramp” is willing to be the bad guy. Somehow I don’t think so.

Here’s the faulty assumption:

He may not like the fact that Obama has clearly distanced himself from the race-mongering “reverend.” But I can promise you that Jesse Jackson isn’t going to campaign on behalf of John McCain any time soon. As a self-described, self-proclaimed voice of black Americans, Jackson surely wants Obama to win.

Actually, I’m not sure about that at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure that as a “self-described, self-proclaimed voice of black Americans,” the last thing Jackson wants is for Obama to win. We’re giving Jackson way too much credit assuming he’s really in all this for black people at this late date. There’s no doubt in my mind that he started off sincere, but whether he still is 40 years on is a completely different issue.

Let’s face it, the race struggle is over and equality won. There are still pockets of racists here and there to be sure, and there always will be. But the overwhelming majority of Americans are now willing to share neighborhoods with black people, to hire qualified black people, to admit them to the colleges they’re qualified for, to put them on the Supreme Court, date them, party with them, and - crucially - vote for them for president. This is post-racial America, and Barack Obama proves it. Which means Jesse Jackson, Rev. Wright, Al Sharpton et al are about to be out of a job. If Barack Obama wins the presidency, it’s going to be awfully hard for Jackson and cohorts to continue to make the case that they’re relevant.

If Jackson’s still sincere about equality, then that he’s irrelevant is exactly what he’s been waiting all his career to hear. He’ll pull out all the stops for Obama, cheer when he wins, and then pack up his bags and go home. Heh. Yeah, I don’t see it happening either. Which is the same thing as saying that I don’t think Jesse Jackson is sincere anymore. At some point along the line inertia took over. He’s been playing the race card for 40 years, and it’s been a lucrative business to be in. No one familiar with Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition can honestly be under the impression that it targets only those corporations and industries where there is endemic prejudice against blacks. No - it operates more like Canada’s HRCs. Which is to say, it automatically assumes any complaint of racism brought against a company by a minority is true, and the only way to keep it off your back is to go much further than reason requires setting up affirmative action programs to address the “problem.” No one has done more to promote black victim culture than Jesse Jackson. He’s not sincere, he’s not a friend to black people, he isn’t interested in equality … and he doesn’t want Obama to win.

So forgive me for being cynical, but I think Jackson intended that little “slip-up” to damage Obama with black voters. I agree with Gallagher as far as saying the slip-up was probably intentional, but the sinister plot here isn’t one of allowing Obama to distance himself from Rainbow/PUSH. At the very best, it’s a reminder to Obama to come knocking at his Don’s door a bit more often. But I’m guessing it’s even worse than that: it’s an outright attempt to sabotage the campaign.

I’ve seen two iconic “hacksploitation” flicks in as many weeks: Hackers and WarGames. Whether they deserve to be or not, these two somehow managed to end up the representatives of the genre for the 1990s and 1980s, respectively. I will now load my taste module and tell you what I think of them.

Alright, I don’t really ask Roger Ebert’s opinion on everything, I just wanted to point out that this is one of those he got more or less right. I would’ve given Hackers a lower rating than 3 stars myself, but Ebert redeems himself yet again another time already by recognizing WarGames for the classic it is. It gets a well-deserved 4 stars, and more importantly, he “gets” that it’s superior to its 1990s counterpart.

Why?

That’s actually something of an interesting question. There’s a lesson here for how to make movies - indeed, how to tell stories in general - that needs pointing out. When I was brainstorming about this myself, the answer I kept coming back to was that WarGames is just “more real” than Hackers. But obviously that’s absurd. Hackers, for all its many flaws, actually has something like a realistic plot. Trying to show off to his hacker friends, a kid hacks an oil company and does a half-assed job of it, getting caught. Normally the company would let it go, but unfortunately the security expert who catches him has been indulging in some salami slicing, and the kid just happened to have downloaded an incriminating file. So rather than take the fall himself, the security expert decides to frame the kid, and the rest of the story is, in addition to being about a rivalry between two hackers, largely about trying to put the blame back where it belongs. I mean, when you really step back and think about it, this is not only “realistic,” it’s probably actually happened not once but several times. Some security experts estimate that salami slicing happens all the goddamn time without ever coming to anyone’s attention. And what criminal won’t frame an amateur if he thinks doing so will get him off the hook? Hacking rivalries, for their part, are real and common. So what’s not to like? Contrast this with WarGames - where we have at the center of the plot an AI so advanced that it isn’t even on the horizon now, let alone 25 years ago when the movie came out. Not to mention - there are a host of glaring continuity errors. Joshua, for example, speaks in the same voice at NORAD that “he” does through David’s terminal, even though David himself tells us that the computer isn’t “really” talking, it’s just being modulated by his own voice synthesizing system. Since that system either doesn’t exist or would be different at NORAD, this seems hugely unlikely. And then there’s the bit about the computer going straight from Tic-Tac-Toe to “Global Thermonuclear War” when “learning” that you can’t win any games. How? No one told it to play “Global Thermonuclear War” with “number of players zero,” or to play any games other than Tic-Tac-Toe, for that matter. And while we can believe that a computer can run through all the possibilities of Tic-Tac-Toe in a matter of seconds, there’s simply no way it can do the same for “Global Thermonuclear War.” There are way too many variables. Chess alone (one of the games Joshua “skipped”) has 10¹²⁰ or so possible games - it’s a good bet that “Global Thermonuclear War” has many more. Anyone honestly think a computer can go through all of them in about a minute? More to the point, if we granted that it could, then the story itself is implausible. Joshua/WOPR’s full-time job, after all, it to do exactly that. If it had been doing its job, it would’ve reached this conclusion a long time before David Lightman hacked it.

Alright, so Hackers is technically more “real” than WarGames. Why does it seem the other way around?

That’s today’s big lesson in fiction writing, kids. It’s not enough to tell a convincing story; half of the craft is in selling it. I’m reminded of the part in Stranger in a Strange Land where Michael Valentine Smith is trying to earn a living as a magician and doing a poor job at it. Which is ironic, since as a telekinetic from Mars with spatial awareness of more than just our three dimensions, Mike actually can make things disappear for real. And yet he doesn’t really impress the crowd. I always thought this was one of Heinlein’s more convincing bits of insight. Magic is only 40% about having clever tricks: the other 60% is all in the show. Cleverness is important, but showmanship counts for more. So it is with movies too, apparently.

And dear ol’ Roger Ebert seems to pick up on this too. Here are some choice quotes from his reviews for each movie.

For Hackers:

The movie is well directed, written and acted, and while it is no doubt true that in real life no hacker could do what the characters in this movie do, it is no doubt equally true that what hackers can do would not make a very entertaining movie.

In other words, Ebert isn’t convinced, but then, he argues, he doesn’t hafta be. The classic defense: “just tell me a good story!”

Interesting, then, what he says about WarGames:

The movie, however, could easily go wrong by bogging us down in impenetrable computerese, or by ignoring the technical details altogether and giving us a “Fail Safe” retread. “WarGames” makes neither mistake. It convinces us that it knows computers, and it makes its knowledge into an amazingly entertaining thriller. (Note I do not claim the movie is accurate about computers — only convincing.)

HA! What a nice way to put it. It’s not just that WarGames fails to be accurate. It’s way beyond that, actually. So isn’t it interesting that it nevertheless manages to be convincing? How?

Well, that’s the magic, of course. If we knew the answer, then presumably someone could write a “Scriptwriting for Dummies” book that would actually work and save us from all Hollywood’s tripe. I don’t know the full answer; I don’t think anyone does. But here are some things that occur to me in this context anyway. So here goes - some tips on how to make a hacksploitation flick and get it right.

(1) Show us a hack that isn’t magic. It’s worth noting, I think, that the only hack the audience can follow in Hackers is the social engineering hack that gets our hero into the cable company early on. He tricks a hapless hourly into giving him the number on a crucial modem. From there on, of course, it’s all black magic. YAAAWWWWNNN. There’s really nothing clever to see here. The “fraud” technique used is as old as the hills. If we were pulling this same trick before the computer age, the method would hardly change. We’d still need to mysteriously know enough about the company’s organization to know exactly which dude to call, we’d still need him to be naive, only back in the good ol’ days instead of ordering the computer to play us the video we want, we’d just have to fake some instructions from upper management. Big deal. Contrast this with the big hack in WarGames. In WarGames, David Lightman programs his computer to call every number in Sunnyvale and remember which ones answer with a computer tone. Not only is it within even the most computer illiterate’s grasp to understand how this might work, it’s a clever sort of solution that you can only do with a computer. Unlike Dade in Hackers, who is playing an old prank with a new tool, David’s playing a prank that wasn’t even possible before home computers. That’s crucial. More to the point, though, WarGames is light on “black box” hacks. In Hackers, we see a lot of people typing at a lot of keyboards and things happening as a result, but the mechanisms are all mysterious. We just have to trust that these people can do the things they can do, and that wears thin after a while. It’s like showing a wizard’s duel and asking us to understand when the characters start to run out of magic. Hard to relate, since none of US can cast spells and have no frame of reference for what’s “tiring” and not here. WarGames never strays from the path on this one. Yeah, sure, we can’t exactly see David’s (BASIC? *snicker*) code, but nothing that he does requires all that much suspension of disbelief. Logging in to the school’s computer to change his grades given the week’s password? Check. Dialing every number in Sunnyvale to find Protovision? Don’t know how he did it, but the point is I believe he could. And from there it’s really out of his hands. There’s no false tension built up by asking us to watch a duel in a medium we do not and CAN NOT have any familiarity with.

(2) Real characters. I would guess that Hackers‘ biggest downfall in the computer believability department probably has little to do with actual computers at all. It’s just that these kids are all obnoxious, unlikeable, and - fair or foul - just don’t really jive with our stereotypes of what hackers are like. They come across as ravers who happen to have hobbies in computers. Everything about them is so over-the-top that it’s hard to shake the impression that the moviemakers are trying to hedge the inevitable “not realistic!” criticism from real-life hackers by hanging flashing neon signs everywhere that say “this isn’t really happening!” Contrast that with David Lightman. There’s a great scene where the FBI agent is talking about how Lightman “fits the profile” for espionage. He’s “intelligent, an underachiever, a loner, bad grades in school.” Heh. Now THAT’s a hacker! Espionage isn’t the only profile that fits. And the people making the movie know that, obviously, which is why they included that line at all. More importantly, the romantic tension between David and Jennifer works as well. David’s outside the normal jock dating rituals, not a very masculine guy. Girls aren’t a priority for him because they can’t be. So what kind of girl does such a guy get? Exactly the kind of girl that Jennifer is, obviously. Shy guys need the girl to sorta make the first move, and Jennifer is that girl for guys like David. She’s popular, probably, but seems likely to be bored with her normal options. She can party with the party crowd if she wants to, but sex isn’t really her thing, and she’d like someone with a bit more depth that she won’t have to share with everyone else. It works. So what is going on in Hackers? Despite what Ebert seems to think, cliche city, actually. It’s the standard story about a guy who gets a bit intimidated by a girl who might just be better than him at “his thing.” She’s aloof, untouchable, he bides his time, make his move by showing her up at her own game and … YAWWWNNN. Yeah, got it. This is the romantic subplot of every *sploitation movie on the market. But even more important, I think, are the background characters. In WarGames, aside from possibly David’s parents, everyone seems like a real human. They’re neither good nor bad, really, they’re just sorta pluggin along doing their thing. The debate between Mr. McKitrick and General Barringer about whether to completely automate the missile launch procedure is intriguing because we don’t really know which side is right - both men make good points. And as for Stephen Falken, he has the right idea about war, but the wrong solution to the problem. It’s a believable position for a brilliant researcher out of the 60s who’s lost his son to take, and demonstrating why it’s wrong serves a real thematic purpose in the movie. But in Hackers? Everyone is an annoying cartoon. The oil execs are conveniently hapless, the cyber criminal is conveniently a prick, the FBI guy might as well have “Moral Majority Certified Witch Hunter” stamped on his forehead, the group of hackers all act like bad high school stoner stereotypes, and so on and so on. The only bit of character innovation we really get is that there’s a Puerto Rican in this movie. Way to go out on a limb, there, guys.

Graphical Restraint. Hackers really pulls out the stops on the computer imagery stuff. If it doens’t exactly take it up to 11 like The Matrix did, it still gets a comfortable 10. There’s too much neon and techno dayglo, and it only takes the average viewer about 20seconds to get really sick of it. In fact, in my case, I can honestly say it’s the biggest barrier to my ever seeing this film again, superficial though that may sound (and be). I don’t like the style, and I can’t get away from it. So Done. WarGames looks like real life for the most part. Aside from the scenes at NORAD headquarters, there isn’t really anything in the movie that looks too technological. David’s computer equipment was dated even when the movie came out, and in any case we don’t get to see too much of it. This is a movie about the computer age, to be sure, but it mercifully doesn’t feel the need to make a fetish out of it. Unlike in Hackers, all the images we see in WarGames are things we’ve either seen before or can easily extrapolate from things we’ve seen before. There are no endless lines of purple code scrolling implausibly quickly across people’s faces.

Well, that’s my stab at it, anyway.

To be perfectly honest, I liked Hackers a wee bit better than I’m letting on here. Yeah, the romantic rivalry thing between the two main characters was cliched and irritating, and I really wanted the movie about computer culture they advertised rather than the one about rave culture I got instead. But it’s not as bad as it might have been. The central villain is interesting for being not too different from the kids we’re supposed to take as the “good guys,” which casts the whole story in a nice amoral light. Our villain isn’t doing anything these kids won’t try themselves someday - he’s only “bad” because circumstances have forced him to pick on their friend. Something to think about. Also, however unconvincing the final product turned out, it’s clear that they hired some real hackers for background research. I appreciated that the Dragon Book made an appearance, for example, and with the right cover and everything! And OK, the reference to RISC architecture was dopey, but hey, I’m pretty sure the scriptwriter doesn’t know how to fix that! Most importantly, I appreciated the general lack of sex. To the extent these characters do it at all, it’s for fun and not really an obsession of theirs. If this movie got nothing else about hacker culture right, at least it stayed true to that one. It isn’t that hackers are asexual people, but they’re certainly less obsessed with sex than the general population, and it’s nice to see that come across in a teen movie. WarGames did it better, of course, but then, WarGames did everything better.

So I’ll see Ebert’s three stars and raise him negative half a star. Hackers wasn’t good, but neither was it terrible. Tone the graphics (and wardrobe) down a bit and I might waste another two hours on it someday.

Which still gives it nothing on WarGames, of course. I’ll be watching that movie again and again till the Singularity.

I consider this some small reason to be hopeful that the libertarian message is getting out. The following graphic is a network analysis of book purchases on Amazon done by Valdis Krebs, whose blog is the newest addition to my daily reading roll.

Basically, it works like this. Krebs takes the “people who bought this book also bought” data from Amazon and clusters the political bestsellers. His clustering methodology isn’t entirely clear. The network patterns you see are generated automatically by software. I’m assuming that’s also more or less true for his cluster identifications. The point I’m not too clear on is how the purple nodes get there. Krebs claims in one part to have colored the nodes himself based on subjective impressions of the content of the books. Fair enough. In another part, however, he speaks as though he’s “surprised” that Ron Paul and George Will’s books end up in the purple zone. This suggests that at least some of the coloring was done on the basis of cluster proximity. It might have been better to use two different visualization approaches here. That is, precolor all the books based on compiler’s impression of whether they’re left or right and then use an additional mechanism to show membership in software-discovered clusters. As it stands, Krebs seems to be confounding a natural expectation of how the book should cluster with how it does cluster, which isn’t as informative as it might be.

Of course, as I say, it’s sort of difficult to me to discern the exact methodology from the post, so there’s the real possibility that I’m being unfair to Krebs by mischaracterizing what he’s actually done.

In any case, the clusters he arrives at jive pretty well with what we might expect the political landscape to look like. One of Krebs’ readers notes that the clusters are really support for and opposition to the Iraq War. Seen in that light, the facts about the purple “buffer zone” make sense. First - the conservatives who find themselves in the “buffer zone” are mostly people like Ron Paul, George Will and Pat Buchanan who, if they have anything in common at all, share a strong stated opposition to neo-cons. Indeed, the relative proximity of the three books to the “red” cluster backs this up. George Will (”One Man’s America”) is closest - which fits, since while he certainly pulls no punches criticizing the Bush Administration, he usually makes it clear that the Republicans are still preferable to the Democrats in the big picture. Pat Buchanan (”Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War”) is a bit more convincing as an anti-neocon (and certainly harsher in his criticism of Bush), but unlike Will he’s also a member of the Religious Right. His positioning shows alienation from the red group, but no real compensatory membership in the blue group. (Indeed, his book is arguably the most isolated on the display.) And then there’s Ron Paul, who from where I sit looks like a blue group member on straight clustering alone, actually. His book was bought almost exclusively by people who also bought other “blue” books, save that a lot of people who bought Buchanan seem to have done so at the same time they did Paul. Indeed, the only other link from Paul goes to Lew Rockwell’s book, which is about what we’d expect. The only reason Lew Rockwell is selling this book in the numbers he is is because Ron Paul’s high profile is acting as his ad agent (anyone who knew who Lew Rockwell was before the campaign probably doesn’t feel the need to buy his latest book - we know the script).

So yeah, I find it wholly convincing that the divide is really along pro- and anti-Iraq War lines. I would just add that I think support for and opposition to this particular war is a proxy for party identification (so we come full circle). I’ve admitted before on this blog that my own support for the war took a long time to drop off precisely because it was more a reaction to the anti-war crowd (which I see as largely self-defeating, irrational anti-patriots) than a firm belief in the policy. And for their part, it’s pretty clear to me that the most vocal anti-war protesters are pretty selective in which wars they oppose. There was no problem with Clinton going into Somalia or Bosnia, for example. The people who buy the blue books are against war as a tool for advancing national interest; the people who buy the red books are against foreign spending for anything other than national interest - and, I suspect, what defines the purple group is an actual principled opposition to war. That is, most of them seem to be people who agree with the red group’s requirement that foreign spending - if it be done at all - only ever be done in direct national interest, but with the additional proviso that war should be avoided. Not “at all costs,” mind you, but that it should be avoided.

Under those terms, I’m proudly purple.

The interesting point is that the war issue seems to be doing a good job selling libertarian books to “blue” readers. Which is a Good Thing in one way. Anti-Capitalism is so entrenched on the left that they’re unlikely to come to free market arguments by any other method. It’s a Bad Thing in another way, though, and that’s in the sense that for strategic reasons I think it’s probably more important that we reach red readers ahead of this election. That is, if we’re serious about getting libertarian policies passed in the next couple of decades, then reminding Republicans that a large part of their natural voting base is less interested in God and displays of patriotism than it is in just getting the government off our backs so we can go about living our own lives in our own ways. (And what better way to do this than giving them a shock by splitting McCain’s vote?) Any way you slice it, that message is antithetical to Democrats, so short-term inroads with that voting block are unlikely. They’re a tougher nut to crack, and honestly I think “cracking” the Democrats means more winning over their supporters to our side than it does merely winning their sympathies on policies. So I can see long-term positives in getting blue readers to read libertarian books. It won’t have an effect overnight, but exposure to free market thinking is desperately needed “over there.” What I’m not seeing are short-term positives in terms of waking the red readers up to free market thinking. They seem to be drifting further and further right, to a national security patriot state that we obviously can’t support.

What it’s looking like, really, is the early 70s all over again, when libertarians were mostly about being against Nixon and the Vietnam War and tended to identify (irrationally, if you ask me) more with the counterculture of the left than with the free market and civil liberties principles that make me a libertarian. We can see more or less eye-to-eye with the Democrats on things like gay marriage and marijuana legalization, but these are superficial issues. Rights and liberties begin with private property, and I think we’ll only ever have so much in common with a party like the Democrats that has only conditional support for property rights.  (We’ll have more long-term luck convincing the Republicans that marijuana legalization is consistent with their belief in property rights than we will getting it passed with the help of the Democrats at the cost of more welfare programs, higher taxes, etc.) So there’s a real sense in which Krebs’ plot shows that we’re reaching the wrong crowd.

Wasting time this morning I read through the Wikipedia entry on Rod Serling and hit a gem.

Serling was also progressive on matters of gender, with many stories featuring quick-thinking, resilient women, although he also wrote stories featuring shrewish, nagging wives.

What a great, unintentional encapsulation of what’s wrong with feminism. Specifically, there are two problems with it.

(1) Why is there a conflict between writing about quick-thinking, resilient women and also nagging, shrewish wives? Both types of women exist in reality, right? Women are people too, possessive of good as well as bad qualities, are they not? Picking out only the good is not “progressive,” it’s propaganda.

(2) We’re overlooking the possibility that the shrewish wives may also be a feminist social commentary. Making women miserable by confining them in the house has the indirect consequence of making men miserable too. The system fails both sexes.

In a nutshell, that’s what’s wrong with feminism. First, it’s so unsophisticated that it can only see “progess” where women are unambiguously good and men unambiguously bad. The less polished of us might call that “sexism” (or “reverse sexism,” if we’re being polite, but I see no reason to be), but apparently we’re just not “progressive” enough. Second, this tunnel vision robs it of its ability to see social commentary that’s beneficial to it where that commentary would implicate men as co-victims of oppressive gender roles.

It kind of reminds me of something I read yesterday on the Feminist SF blog. They’re having a poll currently to make a list of underappreciated gems - with the catch being that these gems have to be feminist. The link goes to some of the suggested entries. Here’s a description of one:

The Psalms of Herod by Esther Friesner - It’s a feminist dystopian novel like THE HANDMAID’S TALE, on crack. Set in a postapocalyptic world in which food is scarce and the human race has mutated bizarrely, and a deeply-warped version of fundamentalist Christianity has become the dominant faith. Like animals, women are only capable of reproducing once a year or so, “in season” - if they have sex outside this time, they die horribly. Alpha males rule small homesteads in which they control the lives of their people utterly. Abortion is the highest sin possible - but unwanted babies are put out on a hillside to die of exposure. Women who refuse to obey are beaten or raped to death; men who show any hint of homosexuality (even if they’re raped) are stoned; people of color are killed on sight; and the most evil creature ever rumored to exist is the Jew.

In other words, reality as it is isn’t oppressive enough, so we’ve written a fantasy world where we can dream about being victims for real. How can you help such people?

We hear a lot about “judicial activism” these days. But it’s always sort of an awkward charge to make - because judges, especially of the Supreme Court variety, aren’t “people like you and me.” While there aren’t any particular training qualifications for being an elected official, to be a high-ranking judge requires years of highly specific training and experience. One has to have the appropriate degree, have passed the appropriate exam, and then on top of that to have gained the respect of his peers. So I’ve always felt a bit impertinent accusing judges of “judicial activism;” they are undeniably more qualified than me to interpret the law.

Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy wants to take it a step further, though, and say that “judicial activism” is not only impertinent but meaningless.

Unless -like Tushnet on the left, or Lino Graglia on the right - you want to do away with judicial review generally or severely restrict it, it makes little sense to criticize decisions as “activist” rather than “wrong.” As between supporters of strong judicial review, the real debate is indeed over competing “views about what the Constitution properly interpreted really means.”

I would like to respectfully disagree. While it’s certainly true that what one sees as “judicial activism” will to a certain degree be influenced by what he thinks the Constitution, properly interpreted, means, it is simply incorrect to say that people who cry “judicial activism” are using that as fancy-pants-speak for “I disagree with the decision.” No, “judicial activism” refers to a specific kind of “wrong,” and it is a pejorative because it implies some kind of duplicity on the part of the “activist” judge. Not just an error, but a deliberate or dishonest error. At the time of writing, Wikipedia has a nice, clear definition of the term as I’m accustomed to using it:

Judicial activism is a pejorative term for the misuse of judicial power for the purpose of obtaining a predetermined judgment based on the political convictions of the judges without regard to the U.S. Constitution, written law or legal precedent.

That packs a bit more in than just “being wrong.”

There’s a simple test, in fact, to determine whether judicial activism is a meaningful category over and above mere “wrongness” for you. You just have to ask yourself if you can imagine a court case in which you liked the policy effects of the outcome but find the decision itself to be plainly at odds with constitutional law. If you can imagine such a thing, then you have a distinction between “procedurally correct” and “politically expedient.” The only missing ingredient here is intention. Judicial activism is any situation where what is “procedurally correct” doesn’t agree with what the judge finds “politically expedient” and there is reason to believe that he allowed political expedience to override what is procedurally correct. “Judicial activism,” therefore, isn’t merely being wrong about a ruling, it is additionally an accusation of a specific type of abuse of power.

For my own part, I can cite the infamous Roe vs. Wade as a decision whose policy consequences I like, but which is plainly procedurally incorrect. That alone is not enough to accuse Harry Blackmun of judicial activism, but the fact that he spent so much time on the lecture circuit arguing that the decision he authored in Roe was vital to gender equality probably is. The implication is that Blackmun had strong personal feelings on the issue and allowed those feelings to determine the ruling for him, rather than a strict adherence to precedent and constitutional laws and procedures. If I believed that Blackmun honestly felt that the 9th and 14th amendments together guaranteed an implied but never enumerated right to abortion, then I would simply accuse him of an honest misreading or misunderstanding of the Constitution. But in fact I don’t believe that it was an honest misunderstanding. I think Blackmun was abusing his power - perhaps not entirely consciously, but doing it nonetheless - to obtain a result that he found politically desirable. He found himself in a position to shape policy on an issue he felt strongly about in the direction he wanted, and the temptation to do so clouded his better legal judgment. Which is to say that the opinion he authored functions more as a rationalization than a justification.

Is it impertinent of me to say so? Undeniably. Justice Blackmun has (erm, “had”) a vastly superior education in constitutional law than my own (which consists of reading Court cases for fun over the course of several years, really). He’s definitely more qualified than me to make these pronouncements. Notwithstanding, experts can be and frequently are wrong, and often because their positions as experts expose them to temptations and pressures that don’t affect the rest of us, as outsiders, nearly as much.

Indeed, I think the point for me about Somin’s post is that I would have thought that legal experts were even more attuned than the rest of us to the dangers and temptations of “judicial activism.” Here’s my reasoning. No one goes into law without some opinions of what the law ought to be, as opposed to what it is. There’s always a conflict between the legal system as one might wish it to be and the legal system we actually have, and surely legal experts have more detailed private descriptions of those differences than the rest of us. If nothing else, they’ve surely spent more time thinking about them. There’s also a fine line in general, I should think, between rationalization and justification. Being trained in legal theory is as much training in an applicable skill as it is in moral philosophy, after all. Some lawyers are indeed training to uphold the rule of law, but others receive the same training merely to find the weaknesses in the system and exploit them to best advantage for their employers. The skillset for these “white hat” and “black hat” lawyers is largely the same. Now, self-deception is as easy as it is ubiquitous. We, all of us, constantly struggle against what we want to believe to try to see ourselves and our place in the world accurately enough to make informed decisions. We all, from time to time, overestimate our intelligence, or our charms and beauty, or our expertise on a matter, or what we can afford, or how much of a workload we can handle, or any number of other things. Being provided with the tools of an expert as often as not merely makes one more adept at self-deception rather than at impartial analysis. I see this all the time in arguments about programming languages. There’s a certain amount of learning that seems to me to inform the debate, granted. You take a couple of classes, and your perspective honestly does change. But there’s a point beyond which new learning only seems to arm people with more tools for the debate. Someone sold on Haskell, say, only gets better at defending it in online discussions after this point. He doesn’t necessarily get any better at recognizing Haskell’s flaws or designing solutions for them. After a certain point, “religion” sets in, and the new skills you learn become just so many tools in your debating arsenal rather than real instruments for getting at the truth. Legal scholars should be and need to be on guard for this sort of thing as much as if not more than the rest of us in their own profession.

No, every profession has these temptations, the legal profession being no exception. Not every expert debate about what the Constitution means is informed and academic. Sometimes, it’s just someone being deceptive or self-deceptive and stacking the deck so that things come out the way he wants. Somin, as a legal expert himself, should recognize that this danger is real and understand the usefulness of having a shorthand name for it.

Perhaps it is the word “activism” to which Somin objects. I can understand that. After all, I’ve just made the case that a lot of what we call “judicial activism” may be self-deceptive - people rationalizing their behavior to themselves rather than intentionally deceiving people. Since the word “activism” implies a kind of conscious engagement, maybe it isn’t the best choice. Whatever we call it, I feel pretty strongly that there should be a name for it. It is an obvious temptation in the legal profession, a specific kind of being “wrong” that legal professionals should actively guard against in themselves and in their peers. A meaningful category by any estimation.